


Gentleman

by evieeden



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: BAMF Natasha Romanov, F/M, POV Natasha Romanov, Post-Avengers (2012), Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Pre-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Protective Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-20
Updated: 2016-12-20
Packaged: 2018-09-10 15:18:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8922139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evieeden/pseuds/evieeden
Summary: Natasha rather enjoyed Steve's gentleman-like behaviour.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Slightly behind on my advent fics this year due to work and illness, if you hadn't already noticed, so I'm trying to catch up with them all as quickly as I can, so thanks to everyone who's bearing with me so far.
> 
> Anyway, today's fic is a Natasha with Steve moment. I hope you like it and thanks for reading. I really appreciate it.

Natasha had spent so long as a Black Widow that people often forgot that she was a woman too.

Her handlers saw her as a weapon. Her targets often viewed her as a little girl – easy to manipulate and easy to break. Even those at SHIELD looked on her first as an assassin and spy rather than a female.

Sometimes she even forgot herself.

Being a woman was just another part of her weaponry in many respects, something to be wielded and launched at her enemies, to confound them until the moment she ground them to ashes beneath her feet.

Which was why it threw her when she was introduced to Steve on the helicarrier.

She could see him, standing with Coulson on the deck, looking out over the Atlantic, his shoulders hunched, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his old-man slacks.

As she approached, Coulson noticed her out of the corner of his eye.

“Agent Romanoff,” he greeted.

The Captain had spun around to greet her as Coulson completed the introduction.

“Captain Rogers.”

Natasha was prepared for his assessing gaze. She was prepared to be looked up and down as if he could ascertain just by sight how useful she was. She was prepared, despite all the records of Rogers and Peggy Carter’s relationship, to be dismissed as an inferior modern female agent, an impression she would have understood given Agent 24’s spectacular fuck up when Rogers first awoke in New York.

Instead he had nodded, maintaining eye contact.

“Ma’am.”

She almost smiled at the old-fashioned greeting and nodded back. “Hi.”

Nothing.

No leering look, no comments or questions about her position at SHIELD. Nothing.

Rogers didn’t change his manner of speaking to her or tone when Coulson left or when Banner joined them. Instead he continued to treat her with polite respect.

He didn’t question her place there on the helicarrier or her position on the team.

He just accepted that if she said she could do something, then she could do it.

There was no ‘are you sures?’ or ‘maybe you shouldn’ts’ or ‘on whose authority are you actings?’.

She said she could handle Barton, so he let her handle Barton. She told him that Barton was trustworthy and could help them, so he trusted her opinion and Barton was on the team. She told him that she wanted to hitch a ride on one of the Chitauri spacecraft to give them an aerial advantage and he gave her a flying boost off the shield.

It was… odd.

And it didn’t end there.

When Rogers came to work for SHIELD, she found out the gentlemanly behaviour was positively ingrained in him.

He held doors open for her and offered her a seat first whenever they attended briefings in one of the Triskelion’s many conference rooms.

After many stuttering and awkward conversations, he called her Natasha at her insistence, but referred back to her official title of Agent Romanoff whenever they were interacting in front of others. It was as if he thought that he would harm her reputation if he acted too ‘familiar’ in front of their colleagues.

She found his behaviour both hilarious and charming in equal measures.

The other SHIELD agents, including Hill and Fury, didn’t seem to know what to make of it the first time she and Steve entered a briefing room together and he pulled out a chair for her to sit on. The whole room fell silent, clearly waiting for her to go postal on him for daring such a ‘chauvinistic’ thing.

Instead, she got to enjoy the shocked looks on their faces when she merely thanked Rogers and sat down, allowing him to tuck her chair closer to the table before taking his own seat.

No-one dared say anything.

On her birthday – or the closer approximation to it that she had – he presented her with two tickets to the New York City Ballet. There was no suggestion that it was a date or a bribe or anything other than a kind gesture he had made after hearing her and Clint talking about the ballet one afternoon.

Natasha took Clint with her and when she thanked Steve the next day with a kiss on his cheek, she smiled to see the dark pink flush that spread across his cheeks and down his neck.

He even made sure she had a safe, private space to get changed for missions.

Most of the time getting changed in front of the other agents didn’t bother her – she hadn’t learnt to be particularly precious about her body or who saw it – but every now and then some jackass, usually a new recruit or someone who didn’t know her reputation, would leer or make some kind of sexist comment about her body that irked her.

It wasn’t that she couldn’t put them in their place. It was just that the last time she did, the rookie in question ended up in hospital receiving physio for the next six months, something Fury wasn’t very happy about.

So in a way it was nice for her for someone else to take that initiative to defend her honour. No one else would think to. And she wouldn’t let them anyway. It wouldn’t do for people – men – to start believing she was some helpless, weak female that needed a man to rescue her. At least she knew that Rogers had only the best of intentions.

Even the most persistently sexist of the Strike team cowered in the face of Steve’s disappointed face.

Natasha quite enjoyed that the men were just as wary of Steve as they were of her in their own way, despite his gentlemanly behaviour any over time.

They carried on as they were, the American soldier and the Russian assassin, and as they worked together, they became closer and she began to appreciate Steve’s polite, simpler way of looking at things, even as she walked him through modern politics and the expanded world of espionage and secrets.

So she allowed him to treat her like a lady when they were on missions together – it would have been cruel in a way to make him treat her as anything else giving his upbringing – and she taught anyone who underestimated her as a result that his manners didn’t weaken her in any way.

Natasha rather liked the respect he gave her, so different from the suspicion and loathing that most others in SHIELD greeted her with.

She wanted it to continue.

She decided to keep him.


End file.
